Gafni was ordered to change the rules at the Kotel (Western Wall) to allow the Women of the Wall organization to pray as they please. “This is your final warning. You will go home with the bodies of one hundred hareidi men,” the letter threatened.

The letter to Gafni was similar to those sent to Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Rabbi Yona Metzger. Those letters, too, warned that hareidi protesters would “return home with dead bodies.”

Gafni’s staff gave the letter to Knesset security.

A statement from his office said, “Recently the hareidi-religious community has been under attack. Its entire way of life has been slandered and vilified. The dangerous provocation of the Women of the Wall could bring disaster on us, G-d forbid.”

“We will not be swayed by threats,” the statement continued. “This is an ideological issue, this is about protecting the remnant of our holy Temple, and we will continue to do so.”

The Women of the Wall group holds monthly prayer rallies for women in which women wear tallit and tefillin, Jewish prayer items normally worn exclusively by men. The group is seeking to change the current rules at the Kotel, and ultimately, according to its founders, to promote “religious pluralism in Israel” in which the Reform and Conservative movements are put on equal footing with traditional orthodox Judaism.